Hi all,
I've been thinking about accommodating severe motor disabilities and put
together demo of an on-line tool with features that I think would be useful
in browsers. The tool
1. assigns keyboard shortcuts (e.g. a, b, c, ... aa, ab, ac... aaa, aab,
aac...) to every link on the page. A typical shortcut looks like this:
{ae} free range chickens
So if a page has 200 links, the person doesn't have to press the tab key
200 time which, for a person with a motor disability, can take several
minutes. By the way, these aren't access keys (which are limited to 1
letter). Instead, you use them with a kluge: you program keyboard or AAC
macros to do a search that jumps to the shortcut.
2. The tool also places a button next to every object that has a
mouseover. You can get to the button with the above shortcut or with the
tab key and it produces the mouseover effect.
This is a crude demo. it doesn't do image maps, and gets confused by
javascript. I'm offering these as implementations to help them make their
way into browsers.
The demo and an accommpaning white paper is at
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/aac-web/
Len
p.s.
I'm going to be off-line for about a month starting monday 4/30 so I
wouldn't be in the discusssion except maybe a bit just before then. Enjoy!
--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple
University
(215) 204-2247 (voice) (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday mailto:kasday@acm.org
Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/
The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant:
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/